No Arabic abstract
Despite decades of practice, finite-size errors in many widely used electronic structure theories for periodic systems remain poorly understood. For periodic systems using a general Monkhorst-Pack grid, there has been no rigorous analysis of the finite-size error in the Hartree-Fock theory (HF) and the second order M{o}ller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2), which are the simplest wavefunction based method, and the simplest post-Hartree-Fock method, respectively. Such calculations can be viewed as a multi-dimensional integral discretized with certain trapezoidal rules. Due to the Coulomb singularity, the integrand has many points of discontinuity in general, and standard error analysis based on the Euler-Maclaurin formula gives overly pessimistic results. The lack of analytic understanding of finite-size errors also impedes the development of effective finite-size correction schemes. We propose a unified method to obtain sharp convergence rates of finite-size errors for the periodic HF and MP2 theories. Our main technical advancement is a generalization of the result of [Lyness, 1976] for obtaining sharp convergence rates of the trapezoidal rule for a class of non-smooth integrands. Our result is applicable to three-dimensional bulk systems as well as low dimensional systems (such as nanowires and 2D materials). Our unified analysis also allows us to prove the effectiveness of the Madelung-constant correction to the Fock exchange energy, and the effectiveness of a recently proposed staggered mesh method for periodic MP2 calculations [Xing, Li, Lin, 2021]. Our analysis connects the effectiveness of the staggered mesh method with integrands with removable singularities, and suggests a new staggered mesh method for reducing finite-size errors of periodic HF calculations.
The calculation of the MP2 correlation energy for extended systems can be viewed as a multi-dimensional integral in the thermodynamic limit, and the standard method for evaluating the MP2 energy can be viewed as a trapezoidal quadrature scheme. We demonstrate that existing analysis neglects certain contributions due to the non-smoothness of the integrand, and may significantly underestimate finite-size errors. We propose a new staggered mesh method, which uses two staggered Monkhorst-Pack meshes for occupied and virtual orbitals, respectively, to compute the MP2 energy. The staggered mesh method circumvents a significant error source in the standard method, in which certain quadrature nodes are always placed on points where the integrand is discontinuous. One significant advantage of the proposed method is that there are no tunable parameters, and the additional numerical effort needed can be negligible compared to the standard MP2 calculation. Numerical results indicate that the staggered mesh method can be particularly advantageous for quasi-1D systems, as well as quasi-2D and 3D systems with certain symmetries.
In quantum chemistry, obtaining a systems mean-field solution and incorporating electron correlation in a post Hartree-Fock (HF) manner comprise one of the standard protocols for ground-state calculations. In principle, this scheme can also describe excited states but is not widely used at present, primarily due to the difficulty of locating the mean-field excited states. With recent developments in excited-state orbital relaxation, self-consistent excited-state solutions can now be located routinely at various levels of theory. In this work, we explore the possibility of correcting HF excited states using M{o}ller-Plesset perturbation theory to the second order. Among various PT2 variants, we find that the restricted open-shell MP2 (ROMP2) gives excitation energies comparable to the best density functional theory results, delivering $sim 0.2$ eV mean unsigned error over a wide range of single-configuration state function excitations, at only non-iterative $O(N^5)$ computational scaling.
We report on a formulation and implementation of a scheme to compute NMR shieldings at second-order Moller-Plesset (MP2) perturbation theory using gauge-including atomic orbitals (GIAOs) to ensure gauge-origin independence and Cholesky decomposition (CD) to handle unperturbed as well as perturbed two-electron integrals. We investigate the accuracy of the CD for the derivatives of the two-electron integrals with respect to an external magnetic field as well as for the computed NMR shieldings, before we illustrate the applicability of our CD based GIAO-MP2 scheme in calculations involving up to about one hundred atoms and more than one thousand basis functions.
We investigate the order-by-order convergence behavior of many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) as a simple and efficient tool to approximate the ground-state energy of closed-shell nuclei. To address the convergence properties directly, we explore perturbative corrections up to 30th order and highlight the role of the partitioning for convergence. The use of a simple Hartree-Fock solution to construct the unperturbed basis leads to a convergent MBPT series for soft interactions, in contrast to, e.g., a harmonic oscillator basis. For larger model spaces and heavier nuclei, where a direct high-order MBPT calculation in not feasible, we perform third-order calculation and compare to advanced ab initio coupled-cluster calculations for the same interactions and model spaces. We demonstrate that third-order MBPT provides ground-state energies for nuclei up into tin isotopic chain that are in excellent agreement with the best available coupled-cluster results at a fraction of the computational cost.
This work presents an algorithm to evaluate Coulomb and exchange matrices in Fock operator using range separation techniques at various aspects. This algorithm is particularly favorable for the scenario of (1) all-electron calculations or (2) computing exchange matrix for a large number of $mathbf{k}$-point samples. An all electron Hartree-Fock calculation with 110k basis functions is demonstrated in this work.